Lubna Mrie

No, no, no.

Because trying to figure out those sides of my father and trying to remember my childhood without being tinted with so much pain and grief was one of the most difficult aspects of writing this book.

Because memoirs, especially memoirs that are filled with pain and grief...

They are very difficult to write because you really need to write about people with love and nuance and write with love even about the people that you hate and despise the most.

And pain tempts us.

Pain and anger tempts us to see things in absolutes.

To flatten people into heroes and villains.

And when you do that, you risk leaving parts of the truth out.

And this is not fair for them and it's not fair for the reader.

I loved how I was being treated when someone asked me about my full name and I mentioned my father.

It was all painful and kind of shameful to admit that, especially after all what my father did later on in my life.

But although as a daughter, I despised him, as an author and as someone writing this memoir, it felt like I had the responsibility towards him to show all sides of him, even the sides that I don't want to remember anymore.

Yeah, so my father had lots of mistresses before my birth and during my mother's pregnancy and even after.

And in that time, in that society, it was very normalized for a guy to have mistresses because as the say was, nothing disgraces a man except his pocket.

So as long as the guy was taking care of his family financially, he can do whatever he wants.

And that was not exceptional to my family.

This was kind of the broad understanding of the gender dynamics.

And if a guy ends up in an affair, it's always on the female.

No, so when my grandmother told my mother, if this marriage does not work out, you are going to bear the consequences alone.

When my father eventually left the country and my mother took us to live in grandmother's house in Damascus, even though I was very young, I was able to sense that we were not welcomed in the house anymore.